How to Document
The first couple of sections in this chapter were about the whys of documenting, what the benefits are, and why you might be in trouble if you do too little or too much. Now it's time to discuss the how, some of the forms of documentation that exist, how they can be useful (or otherwise), and how to go about making them.
Coding Standards
Most organizations with more than a couple of developers working together have a style guide or coding standard. This document explains the minutiae of writing code to create a "company style": where to put the brackets, how to name variables, how many spaces to indent by, and so on. If you haven't seen one before, the GNU coding standard—http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html is very comprehensive. Indeed, one company I worked at required their code to conform to the GNU standard rather than writing their own: it already existed, covered most issues, and was easy to conform to.
Coding standards are great...
